America at Large:I never thought I'd find myself writing about OJ Simpson again, but it appears he just won't go away. It has been 28 years since he last carried a football and a dozen years since he was acquitted in the murder of his ex-wife. He hasn't held a paying job since, but you have to give him this much: by keeping his face before the public he has managed to accomplish something that eludes most retired athletes.
If anything, the Juice is more recognisable than ever.
As of yesterday morning Simpson was still in a Las Vegas jail cell, where he has been held since Sunday charged with 11 offences, among them armed robbery and felony kidnapping. There is surely some irony in the fact that Simpson's latest brush with the law occurred the same week he became a best-selling author. The now-retitled If I Did It (a book Simpson now says he did not write, about two murders he did not commit) hit the number one spot on the Amazon.com best-seller list last week. (It has since dropped to number three). Last Friday night Simpson, accompanied by an armed posse, apparently staged a commando raid on a Las Vegas hotel room occupied by two sports memorabilia dealers and, at gunpoint, made off with a cache of items Simpson claimed belonged to him. (Although it seems plain enough that many of them did not).
Although I watched Simpson's career as a Heisman Trophy-winning running back at the University of Southern California, it was mostly on television. The first time I saw him in the flesh came at the 1967 Millrose Games, where he ran in the 60-yard dash. (At USC, Simpson was a member of a 440-yard relay team that set a world record). I covered pretty much all of Simpson's NFL career - first with the Buffalo Bills, and later with the San Francisco 49ers - and ran into him frequently when, after retiring, he became part of NBC's broadcast team, but it occurs to me that over the years many of my Simpson memories involve Ireland or golf or both.
Flush with a pocket full of book money, I went to Ireland for the holidays in 1973, and was in Dublin when OJ broke the NFL single-season rushing record in the final game of the season.
In 1994, I was at ringside (as were the Fureys and the Chieftains) in Atlantic City for Wayne McCullough's first televised main event, otherwise known as the fight nobody watched. When he climbed down out of the ring after 12 gruelling rounds with Victor Rabinales that night, the Pocket Rocket went looking for his wife. He found her glued to a television monitor, which, like every other set in America, was showing the police pursuing a white Bronco containing OJ Simpson through the streets and freeways of Los Angeles.
The following autumn I was with Finbar Furey on a golf course in Saratoga Springs when the clubhouse loudspeaker announced a two-word message that required no further explanation: Not Guilty. Released, Simpson was free to play golf again, but playing partners were in short supply. So far as I know Simpson wasn't officially drummed out of Riviera, but Sugar Ray Leonard, a fellow member at Simpson's club, told me that the members' wives had in no uncertain terms informed their husbands that if they played golf with OJ they needn't bother coming home that night.
At Riviera, incidentally, Simpson had been a somewhat notorious sandbagger who kept his handicap puffed up for gambling purposes.
This situation was addressed during his incarnation. The film director Ron Shelton explained that some of his fellow Riviera members took to punching faux scores under Simpson's name into the club computer. OJ had played to 12 when he went to jail; his handicap was five by the time he got out.
Although he was acquitted on the double-murder charge, the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the accidental victim, were awarded $33.5 million in a wrongful death lawsuit, but they have seen precious little of the money. Simpson's home and cars are beyond the reach of the law. So is his hefty NFL pension. A recent examination of his federal tax returns showed that a couple of years ago Simpson had a reported income of over $400,000, none of which could be attached by the Browns or the Goldmans.
Although the events of last Friday evening sound like a strong-arm robbery gone bad, the kidnapping charge does seem a stretch, since the victims never left their hotel room. A Nevada law enforcement official explained that prosecutors sometimes "aim high" in these cases, possibly to induce the co-operation of some of Simpson's gun-toting co-defendants - who, unless we miss our guess, are going to roll over on him faster than you can say Michael Vick.
How Simpson feels about his newfound status as a best-selling author remains unlearned, but - speaking of aiming high - I found myself thinking of the publication of another revisionist book half a century ago. Dr Wernher von Braun, who had overseen the development of the Nazi V-2 rocket programme during the second World War, had reinvented himself as the beloved father of the American space programme by the time he issued his self-serving biography, I aim At The Stars. The humorist Mort Sahl suggested that von Braun's book should have been subtitled . . . but sometimes I hit London.
Ron Goldman's father Fred has pursued the wrongful death award more vigorously than have the Browns, and after Simpson's controversial book was withdrawn by its publisher last year, Goldman was awarded the right to publish the book and collect on its royalties. Although Simpson's name was removed as author, when it was released earlier this month it was under a modified and catchier title you've just got to love: It's now called If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer.
